Margaret Brown (‘Descendant’ director) on uncovering century-old family secrets and the African slave ship Clotilda [Exclusive Video Interview]
“You could be lynched for telling the story,” reveals director Margaret Brown while discussing her Netflix documentary “Descendant.” For our recent webchat she adds, “The people in the community were told to keep it in their family. Keep passing it down, because it’s an important family story, but it’s also a dangerous story. People were told to keep quiet for over 100 years.” We talked with Brown as part of Gold Derby’s special “Meet the Experts” Q&A event with 2022/2023 awards contenders. Watch our exclusive video interview above.
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In “Descendant,” Brown follows descendants of the survivors from the Clotilda, the last ship that carried enslaved Africans to the United States, as they reclaim their story. They live in the small Alabama town of Plateau, also known as Africatown. For the director, it was a story close to home. “I’m from Mobile,” she explains. “15 years ago I made a film called ‘The Order of Myths’ that was about segregated Mardi Gras in Mobile. Back then my mom told me that the white Mardi Gras queen was named Helen Meaher. The Meaher family was the family that brought the Clotilda, the last slave ship to the United Staes. I didn’t know. I hadn’t learned that in school. I didn’t know that would even be part of the story I was telling in that film 15 years ago. After Mardi Gras was over, I was filming with the Black Mardi Gras queen and her grandparents. The grandfather sort of casually said, “My people are from [Meaher’s] ship.”
One of the most shocking moments of the film is when remnants of the Clotilda are actually recovered, over a century after the ship had sunk. “We started filming two years before the ship was verified as the Clotilda,” Brown reveals. “I started hearing they had found the ship and they thought it was the Clotilda. The whole international press descended upon Mobile. People were contacting me who had seen ‘Oder of Myths.’ I was not planning on coming back. Eventually I was sort of convinced by a producer who literally wrote me a check and put me on a plane. I knew I had something that no one else had because Helen Meaher had been in my prior movie, and that family was not talking to anybody. I thought, they’ll talk to me, this white family. But they ended up not talking to me. Now that there’s an actual ship, maybe the rules change, but they never spoke to me.”
Brown admits that the most difficult thing about making this film about Black descendants of a slave ship was her own whiteness. “I started thinking I had access to this white family that no one else could get access to, but I ended up not getting access to them. After [‘The Order of Myths’] came out, a lot of white families didn’t want to talk to me. They heard I was doing sort of a spiritual sequel I guess. It ended up being a film very much about Black storytelling and the Black experience. I have so many blind spots as a white person. The film changed.”
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